Horrifying CNN Celebration of Luigi, Sanchez in Space, and Maher's White House Trip, with Walter Kirn and Matt Taibbi | Ep. 1048

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Speaker 4 Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Channel 111 every weekday at Noon East.

Speaker 4 Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and happy Monday and happy birthday, Yardley.
My daughter turns 14 today.

Speaker 4 All you moms and dads out there know, it seems like yesterday. You know, so crazy how in a blink of an eye, 14 years go by and soon it'll be 18.

Speaker 4 And then they tell me she might leave me, though I'm in denial about that fact for my daughter and my two sons. Anyway, happy birthday, sweetheart.
It was a very busy weekend.

Speaker 4 President Donald Trump was getting standing ovations at the UFC event on Saturday, mingling with Shaq. That was quite a sight.
Joe Rogan and more.

Speaker 4 Bernie Sanders and AOC, they were back out on their fighting the oligarchy tour. You know, the one that she's been flying first class to and from.

Speaker 4 You know, oligarchy for me, but not for thee, is really what she's saying.

Speaker 4 And then this morning, a bunch of ladies celebrated female empowerment by putting on sexy, fake astronaut suits and going up into sort of outer space for 11 minutes.

Speaker 4 Through all of the engineering and mathematical wizardry and physics wizardry of a bunch of people who didn't get any credit and were behind some control room panel.

Speaker 4 I guess we're supposed to believe that like Gail King is an astronaut now.

Speaker 4 We're supposed to be celebrating them. Somehow it's supposed to be empowering because not enough women have gone up into space.
What we mean is not enough are

Speaker 4 astronauts. Not enough women are astronauts.
That's what we mean.

Speaker 4 We don't mean please put Gail King in yet another opportunity for her to try to act like a star while she's next to Oprah, who also was there, of course.

Speaker 4 She didn't get to go up, but she stood there on the sidelines.

Speaker 4 I don't feel empowered. This is like another,

Speaker 4 it's female White House Press Corps Day at the White House. Remember, I told you this during Obama? They were like, it's female empowerment day or whatever.

Speaker 4 And they invited a bunch of women, including your struggle and some people from Fox, to go over there and interview the president. And I was like, no, it's a no.

Speaker 4 You can, I'll go over when I'm getting asked there because I'm worthy as a journalist, period, not journalist with a vagina. Okay.

Speaker 4 I don't really want to be celebrated for that at all by anyone who doesn't know me. And

Speaker 4 I just feel uncomfortable about this. Like, why? If they had been six astronauts going up there, then yes, okay.
What did they do?

Speaker 4 The one gal is engaged to a billionaire, and these are a bunch of celebrities she wanted to befriend. Okay.

Speaker 4 Of course, Lauren Chands has...

Speaker 4 whatever her name had to show off her tits. Okay, it's a little early in the hour to be dropping the T-word.
Her breasts in her little fake astronaut outfit.

Speaker 4 Because, you know, what's a day if we don't get to see the girls on Lauren Sanchez? It's not as offensive as showing them at the presidential inauguration, but I think it's a little off message.

Speaker 4 Isn't it a little off-message? We're going to get into all the big stories today. Joining me now for the full show, Matt Taibbi, editor of Racket News on Substack, and Walter Kern.

Speaker 4 He's editor at large for County Highway, which I like, County Highway. Together, they host the America This Week podcast.

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Speaker 4 Guys, welcome back to the show.

Speaker 2 Thanks for having us on. Great to be here.

Speaker 4 I mean, nothing says female empowerment like getting this opportunity to go to outer space and making sure everyone can see your breasts.

Speaker 4 I think it's important as they beam this woman into outer space that we answer the question, but what do her breasts look like? Am I wrong?

Speaker 2 Lifted. I hear there's no gravity in space.

Speaker 2 Space is the cosmic bra.

Speaker 2 That Katy Perry needs to be further empowered bothers me. She's already got about a billion dollars.
And, you know, short of Taylor Swift is the most famous pop star and female pop star in the world.

Speaker 2 That she needs empowerment says something sad about women because it means that even with a billion dollars, they still need a boost

Speaker 2 from the space program or Jeff Bezos' private space program. But they were all oligarchs, let's remember.
They were oligarchs in space. And

Speaker 4 so uh they're trying to have their cake and eat it too on on the left i guess if that's that's exactly right if that's the left chief harry was quoted as saying we're putting the ass in astronauts okay all right

Speaker 4 you go girl this is so

Speaker 2 this is why she needs empowering because she keeps revealing her stupidity like that and we have to boost her back up

Speaker 4 It's so cringy. I'm sorry, but I'm like, why are you, don't show your boobs.
Don't talk about your ass.

Speaker 4 Don't get your specially made spacesuit so that we can make sure to see all your curves as you go to outer space. Is that what it is to be a woman?

Speaker 4 Just show off as much sex appeal, ass, and boob as you can. I don't, Matt,

Speaker 4 I'm not sure. I didn't catch that page in the female handbook.

Speaker 2 I'm a little bit confused about the political meaning of toplessness now.

Speaker 2 You know, we saw there was that demonstration in Paris where all of the demonstrators were topless.

Speaker 2 And I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to look, not look, look furtively.

Speaker 2 Also,

Speaker 2 what exactly the meaning of that was supposed to be. Was it supposed to be erotic, de-eroticizing?

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a very strange message now.

Speaker 2 I think it's supposed to be something about empowerment, but it comes across as mostly confusing to me. So

Speaker 4 I don't know.

Speaker 4 They dropped the movie Hidden Figures years ago, right? And that's a great movie about

Speaker 4 women who are behind the scenes. I don't know how true it is, but it's a great movie.
And it's women who are behind the scenes at NASA and contributed to the space program. Okay, that I get.

Speaker 4 What did these women do?

Speaker 4 Like, honestly, one is sleeping with a billionaire who created this program and is jetting people, I mean, to outer space for like 10 minutes, you know, for as long as like your average YouTube video takes.

Speaker 4 And they came back and they're like, everything's changed. Is it, I don't, okay.

Speaker 4 They had nothing to do with any of the engineering. There's basically they're just looking for famous faces who could draw attention to Jeff Bezos' weird little rocket.

Speaker 4 His first little rocket looks exactly like a penis. Exactly.
The guy's working something out. I think he's like working out his sexual fantasies on us.

Speaker 4 And this one looks exactly like a breast with the nipple on the top. Look at this one.
I'm sorry, gentlemen. You know exactly what that looks like.
Everyone does. And now look at this one.

Speaker 4 It's like a, I guess you could say igloo if you wanted to be charitable. To me, it looks like a breast above from above.
It really looks like a breast from a nipple.

Speaker 4 Walter.

Speaker 2 It's a little glans-like.

Speaker 4 It's a glands-like.

Speaker 2 I was in terror that we were going to have another space shuttle disaster and that we were going to have to mourn these people for maybe the next 700 years.

Speaker 2 They did add to the space program something that it hasn't had, which is the red carpet

Speaker 2 and the sort of fashion critique at the beginning. So it was a combination of the MTV Music Awards, the Oscars, you know, and the Apollo program.

Speaker 2 I thought it was condescending. I think that's what you're getting at.

Speaker 2 It was belittling to women, and they belittle women with their behavior and their,

Speaker 2 I don't know, antics, I would call them.

Speaker 4 i don't know

Speaker 2 i was under the impression that that most astronauts were basically um

Speaker 2 mostly women or at least half women now i i didn't

Speaker 4 they probably are

Speaker 4 yeah i didn't uh there was nothing um was that part of their critique that there aren't enough yes yes really because it seems like there are quite a lot of female astronauts no lauren sanchez is saying like i don't know they're crossing some new frontier for women.

Speaker 4 Here she was in her post-flight interview. Let's hear how she enjoyed it.

Speaker 3 Earth looked so,

Speaker 6 it was so quiet.

Speaker 3 It was just quiet.

Speaker 4 And is it what you expected?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 4 Better?

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 I don't think you can describe it

Speaker 3 because, you know what I was saying? It was like quiet, but then also.

Speaker 2 That's because you were inside a space capsule.

Speaker 4 And you look at it and you're like,

Speaker 3 We're all in this together. Seeing Jeff before I left, I just went, Yeah, like, yeah, you know,

Speaker 3 I had to come back. I mean, we're getting married.

Speaker 4 If I didn't come back,

Speaker 3 that would be a bummer for me.

Speaker 4 Only you, by the way, would say this to me. You said, Jeff, if you don't want to marry me, you don't have to send me to space.

Speaker 2 You don't have to send me to space.

Speaker 4 I'm sorry. We're watching this woman.
She was a news anchor like 10 years ago. Then she married the head of CAA.
And then she reportedly cheated on him with Jeff Bezos and moved on to Jeff Bezos.

Speaker 4 And now we're supposed to celebrate her crossing new barriers for women, meaning boinking a billionaire and getting a free ticket to space for 11 minutes. It was flat, but quiet.

Speaker 4 Like these profundities, Walter. Hold a buckle up.

Speaker 2 You know, I actually met a female astronaut once who was on the space shuttle and had quite an interesting conversation with her.

Speaker 2 And real astronauts are extremely intelligent scientists who've been tested to the limits of their physical and mental fitness. But this was really not women in space.
It was stupid people in space.

Speaker 2 This was the lowest IQ space crew that has ever been launched from Earth.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 she didn't even have the wit to have some writer give her lines for when she got back. She tried to make them up.
It was so quiet. Yeah, you were in a soundproof space capsule, lady.

Speaker 2 It was a little far out space nuts. A little bit.
Little space nuts.

Speaker 4 On that front, can you just watch? Here, here are the women dramatically exiting the nipple-shaped space capsule. Watch.

Speaker 4 There's the billionaire. See, honey, see what I got you for Christmas.

Speaker 2 She hasn't been away that long, dude. It was 10 minutes.

Speaker 4 I know, literally.

Speaker 4 That's where her pay. They're treating her like she was in Nom.

Speaker 4 Where are my babies? My babies. Like, she was almost dead.
Here's Katie Perry.

Speaker 4 Kisses the ground. Right, right.
You were in such danger.

Speaker 4 Gail King, thanking God. And by that, I mean Oprah, without whom she'd have no career.

Speaker 4 She too. Okay, kisses the ground.
Somebody already, you should be kissing Oprah. Oprah's there.
Kiss Oprah.

Speaker 4 She's worth worth far more to you than than the ground thank you jesus she's i mean truly it's like they're right back from nom i think what did they do they got in their special oscar de la redesign suits laid down in a capsule and came back in 10 minutes you guys

Speaker 2 That was one small step for womankind, one giant leap backwards for mankind, as far as I can see.

Speaker 2 Or one giant step forward for reality shows.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 2 That was a reality.

Speaker 2 It could be a great concept, like, you know, dumb celebrities in space. I would watch that.

Speaker 4 Wasn't there like at least a little part of you that was hoping they'd get on tethered?

Speaker 4 You know, they could just like, I didn't want them to like die, but maybe just be out there for a while so we could have a break from all this nonsense, especially from Lauren Sanchez.

Speaker 4 It's like, why are we pretending she's done anything? She

Speaker 4 is with Jeff Bezos. That's literally why we know her name.
And again, it was all over the tabloids. Like they got together through an extramarital.
All right, fine. People fall out of love.

Speaker 4 But like, why are we celebrating this? Like, oh, the love affair. They're going to have this bazillion-dollar wedding ceremony.
And you can tell exactly who they're trying to like cozy up to.

Speaker 4 They were either on the nipple-shaped space capsule or they run cover for them in the press. But it's because we have this obsession with money, right? With like

Speaker 4 what looks like achievement. And Jeff Bezos is obviously very, very accomplished.
But to me, it's like, I don't know, Matt, you and I have talked about this before.

Speaker 4 Like, as a journalist, the more people fawn over somebody like Bezos and this, the more I want to run the other direction, right? It's like my reporterial instincts are: ew,

Speaker 4 they're forming clubs again, and I don't want to be a member of any of them.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the more supplicating that goes on, the more uncomfortable you usually get.

Speaker 2 And there was a lot of that in this one. I guess they did prove that Botox survives re-entry into the atmosphere.

Speaker 4 Good to know.

Speaker 4 Or they said rear entry, which has already been proven. Okay, but

Speaker 4 they are after. It's only 13 minutes after.
What's happening? Walter, you've lost control of this show.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I have.

Speaker 2 Why don't they send somebody into space who can actually come back and describe it well? You know, not just a journalist, but a poet or something. I mean,

Speaker 2 they went to space and we have no idea what it was like, except that it was very quiet.

Speaker 4 It was quiet. It was like big and stuff.

Speaker 4 Maybe Carrie Perry.

Speaker 2 Katie will write a song about it, you know.

Speaker 2 But yeah, that was a nullity. That was a publicity stunt that probably cost more money than any in history.

Speaker 2 The Elon Envy from Jeff Bezos is just absolutely, you know, conspicuous.

Speaker 2 Elon would get supermodels and a poet or something interesting for a crew. This was terrible.

Speaker 4 Here is, my team just sent me the side-by-side

Speaker 4 2021 Blue Origin versus Now,

Speaker 4 which I think was the first flight. There's

Speaker 4 Bezos in the cowboy hat and three others. And now here's the ladies of the new Blue Origin on the right with their sexy, like, it looks like something that

Speaker 4 remember that original Jennifer Garner movie that made her a star where she was like the spy climbing over like the lights, the beams of light and so looks like something our spies might need to wear.

Speaker 4 Um, and really, it's just Lauren Sanchez gave this long interview about why they wore this tight outfit over here on the right. Here it is in SOT 31.
Watch this,

Speaker 4 where's Carrie Ann?

Speaker 4 From her Instagram, she's bowing.

Speaker 7 Well, they're comfortable.

Speaker 8 Okay, that's for sure.

Speaker 4 They're comfortable.

Speaker 4 Again, she went to Oscar DeLaurenta's people and she rejected, just so you know, I know, Matt, you were wondering, she rejected pockets on the hips because they didn't want to look too

Speaker 4 hippie. And then they had zippers put on the bottom of the pants so that she could go flare or not, depending on each each woman's preference.
Um, and from for all that, what did we get?

Speaker 4 We, yeah, we got

Speaker 4 it, it was like quiet, but also alive.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you know what I'm saying? I don't think you can describe it because, like, you know what I'm saying? Like, quiet, but then also really like alive.

Speaker 4 And then the takeaway, we're all in this together.

Speaker 2 No, we aren't. I didn't get to go.
You didn't get to go. Matt didn't get to go.
99

Speaker 2 and 99% of the people who ever lived didn't get to go. They chose these airheads.

Speaker 2 Send a kid into space, like an eight-year-old kid who will actually be thrilled and impressed and come back and tell us something.

Speaker 2 This girl is so, this Sanchez is so spoiled that even going into space didn't impress her, you know?

Speaker 4 Oh, God.

Speaker 4 Very, very little will when you're married to Jeff Bezos and you could literally afford to buy it and sell everyone in America's family. But I suppose we're supposed to celebrate her.

Speaker 4 That's what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to celebrate her because accomplishment.

Speaker 4 She bagged the billionaire after banging the billionaire after allegedly cheating, at least according to what I read in the National Enquirer.

Speaker 4 But there was a whole lawsuit about it where she accused, they said maybe her brother had sold pictures of text messages between the two of them.

Speaker 4 Then he claimed he'd been like falsely attacked by, I can't remember who he blamed it on, a foreign government. Anyway, it was a big scandal.
Enough of them.

Speaker 4 Now, in other news about deplorable people, some absolute lunatic firebombed the Pennsylvania governor's mansion where Josh Shapiro and his wife and their children were sleeping.

Speaker 4 This guy goes in there at two in the morning. I have to say, it wasn't exactly like a Jack Bauer entry.

Speaker 4 Seems like no one really tried to stop him.

Speaker 4 I don't know what the story is on the governor's security, but I'm underwhelmed that he managed to break the window, get into the governor's mansion, and start dropping Molotov cocktails.

Speaker 4 And then apparently, it took them a while to actually track him down. That's a separate matter.
Look at the devastation inside the mansion.

Speaker 4 You could hear Governor Shapiro came out after the fact, and you could tell he was somewhat rattled. Here he is, SAT 21.

Speaker 9 Last night, we experienced an attack not just on our family, but on the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania here at the governor's residence.

Speaker 9 I spoke a couple hours ago with Director Cash Patel of the FBI. He promised all of the resources of the federal government.

Speaker 9 He was extremely kind and courteous and thoughtful in his conversation with me.

Speaker 2 I thanked him and the women and men of the FBI and the President of the United States for their support. Lori and I are

Speaker 4 Lori and I are overwhelmed

Speaker 9 by the prayers

Speaker 9 and the messages of support that we've received from all across Pennsylvania and all across the United States.

Speaker 4 Wow.

Speaker 4 I feel for him. He's got four young kids.
I mean, they came pretty close to being killed

Speaker 4 this evening. And

Speaker 4 it was by some 38-year-old guy, reportedly Cody Bommer is his name. He's now charged with attempted murder, terrorism, aggravated arson.
Look at this.

Speaker 4 This is reminding me of like the Notre Dame Cathedral shots we saw after it burned.

Speaker 4 Aggravated arson. He may also face federal charges still.
This

Speaker 4 man, Bommer, is a father of at least five, four sons and a daughter, according to a 2020 Facebook post.

Speaker 4 Unconfirmed information on Bomber, someone found an old Facebook post from him, purportedly from him. These things come out in the days after, and then they sometimes turn out not to be true

Speaker 4 as an asterisk here. But his Facebook post, we believe, says he's a registered socialist.
Voting record shows nonpartisan, unaffiliated voter.

Speaker 4 Social media posts show he supported Black Lives Matter, universal health care as a right, criticized MA supporters, Christians, and the Second Amendment, was also anti-Biden.

Speaker 4 Had a post that read, knowing is half the battle, the other half is extreme violence, shared posts supporting mask mandates during COVID, Rance slamming toxic femininity, complained about gas prices, supported

Speaker 4 Kanye West's presidential run, et cetera. I mean, it sounds like this guy started deteriorating.

Speaker 4 And then the New York Post reports that his Harrisburg, Pennsylvania property was subject to a foreclosure.

Speaker 4 And he was facing that the sale was about to go ahead and had obvious serious resentments for Governor Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, and his wife Lori and their four children, two dogs, and another family who lived there.

Speaker 4 No injuries. I should have mentioned that up higher.

Speaker 4 One last thing.

Speaker 4 He acted quickly. He got into the home.
He was there for less than a minute. And

Speaker 4 the break-in and setting of the fire happened while the troopers were looking for him.

Speaker 4 The officials believe he did have a plan, noting how quickly he was in and out of the residence and calling him methodical in his approach.

Speaker 4 He exited the property the same way he entered it over the fence. So what do we make of this? Is this a political story? Is this a random nutcase story?

Speaker 4 What is this story, guys?

Speaker 4 Walter?

Speaker 4 Well.

Speaker 2 Democrats are going to have to be careful because I don't know how they distinguish between different sorts of violence and political violence anymore.

Speaker 2 You know, if he'd been in a Tesla or just gotten out of one, it would have been thought to be maybe

Speaker 2 commendable that someone had firebombed it. If he were Luigi and he were good looking and had actually succeeded in killing someone,

Speaker 2 he might have been celebrated by Taylor Lorenz and people like that.

Speaker 2 As it is, he's not a very attractive or a very sane human being, and he nearly killed children and there's nothing to do with him but you know throw away the key but we're starting to get into a world of blurred lines around violence and

Speaker 2 as much as I am horrified by this and I really do feel bad for those kids they're going to be genuinely traumatized and scared, especially because their father has ambitions in politics.

Speaker 2 But let's lay off the violence across the board or at least lay off the fandom around certain kinds of it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, the

Speaker 4 Free Beacons, Peter Hassan, tweeted out, this is exactly why it's so dangerous to lionize Luigi Mangioni. If it's okay to hit anybody in power you consider evil, then any politician is fair game.

Speaker 4 I mean, it's an interesting point now because it's not every day you see a governor's mansion firebombed, Matt.

Speaker 4 This is a striking development in the land of political attacks. And I use that term generically for a reason.

Speaker 4 I don't know whether this guy's a nutcase. He sounds extreme in his political rhetoric, but I'm not seeing

Speaker 4 stuff about like being abducted by space aliens in his social media that we've unearthed so far. He sounds like somebody was pissed off about his foreclosure.

Speaker 4 And I can't help watching this thinking, we'd be hearing very different messaging from the Democrat side if this had been Ron DeSantis. I really think we would.
There'd be an attempt to

Speaker 4 understand,

Speaker 4 well, you know, how Ron DeSantis brought this on himself.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, I think it's going to be critical to determine what exactly the motive was here.

Speaker 2 You know, very often in these cases, when people do extremely destructive things, including things like school shootings, a significant percentage of those folks are,

Speaker 2 you know, sociopathic, predisposed to violence of some kind or another.

Speaker 2 And people attribute motives to them that they assume because of the way they dress or because of what music they listen to or that sort of thing.

Speaker 2 So, in this case,

Speaker 2 all we have are some superficial indicia, right?

Speaker 2 We see a person who is associated with a lot of traditionally left-leaning causes targeting a democratic governor who, you know, maybe stands out on one or two particular issues as

Speaker 2 being something that kind of traditional liberals or socialists might not be happy about. But we can't assume that that's the reason.

Speaker 2 Frankly, on the foreclosure front, as somebody who's covered foreclosure courts, I'm a little surprised there hasn't been more violence of this kind dating back to the mid-2000s because I've seen seen how enraged people are by being thrown out of their homes.

Speaker 2 You know, a significant percentage of those people are tossed out kind of unfairly.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 you know, we don't know,

Speaker 2 but I think, you know, Walter's right to talk about the lionization of Luigi and how

Speaker 2 we're in this space now where a big segment of the media is kind of intellectualizing violence as

Speaker 2 a logical response to things. And that is very scary.

Speaker 4 It's the new version of intellectualizing looting and rioting as, you know, one of the available options to you when you have some sort of societal upset.

Speaker 4 You mentioned Walter Taylor Lorenz for a reason, former New York Times, former Washington Post columnist who is now trying to make it in the independent lane. And she sat down with

Speaker 4 CNN's Donnie, is it Donnie O'Sullivan?

Speaker 4 I actually don't know this guy, who's got some show about misinformation and had the most remarkable exchange regarding Luigi Mangioni, the man who stands accused of gunning down in cold blood the CEO of United Healthcare a couple of months ago.

Speaker 4 Here it is.

Speaker 7 Hilarious to see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone standing a murderer when this is the United States of America, as if we don't lionize criminals, as if we don't have, you know, we don't stand

Speaker 7 murderers of all sorts. And we give them Netflix shows.
There's a huge disconnect between the narratives and angles that sort of mainstream media pushes and what the American public feels.

Speaker 7 And you see that in moments like this.

Speaker 4 The women who got her outside court in New York.

Speaker 7 So you're going to see women, especially, that feel like, oh my god, right? Like, here's this man who's revolutionary, who's famous, who's handsome, who's young, who's smart?

Speaker 7 He's a person that seems this, like, this morally good man, which is hard to find.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I just realized women will literally date an assassin before they swipe right on me. That's where we're at.

Speaker 4 That is repulsive.

Speaker 4 The way she describes Luigi Mangioni as if, and not in a mocking way, not like

Speaker 4 these lunatics are going to say the following things about him. She clearly shares in it.
She obviously tweeted out something sympathetic about him right after he did it.

Speaker 4 This is right in her wheelhouse because she claims she's got every ailment known to man and womankind. I don't, from the pulling out the hair to the nail, I don't, she's got a lot of issues.

Speaker 4 So she blames, now she blames them all in insurance companies. So she clearly looks at this guy as a hero.
And that's her talking about, for the audience that doesn't know, Stanning is like,

Speaker 4 you know, stalkery fanning, like, like over-the-top fandom. And

Speaker 4 she's talking about him as a, quote, morally good man. He's a person that seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.
And then laughter.

Speaker 4 This guy doesn't, no pushback from CNN's correspondent, O'Sullivan. No pushback whatsoever, Matt.

Speaker 2 I mean, there's so many things that are crazy about this that one doesn't even know where to start.

Speaker 2 Walter and I, just a couple of weeks ago, we did a segment on Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find because because it was the 100th anniversary of her birth.

Speaker 2 And here's Taylor Lorenz, who is probably the most anti-literate person in media, making a reference to A Good Man is Hard to Find.

Speaker 2 She's someone who, if you handed her a hardcover book, would be tempted to bite it, I think.

Speaker 2 She's probably never read anything in her life.

Speaker 2 And I think she missed, if she did know that story, she misunderstood the point of it clearly.

Speaker 2 Uh, but this idea of Luigi Mangione as a morally good man, I, I just, I don't know how that goes over and how, what, what CNN is thinking, putting that on the air. Right.

Speaker 4 It's just crazy.

Speaker 4 To your point about the books, uh, it reminds me of, we love Victor Davis Sanson. We have him on all the time.
He's truly a brilliant guy.

Speaker 4 He knows everything, encyclopedic knowledge of so many subjects. And we always.
you know, say like if if Victor says it happened, it happened because his memory is so good and it's solid.

Speaker 4 But he clearly is is an avid reader. I mean, he's a college professor many years.

Speaker 4 He's an avid reader. He's not really an avid pop culture consumer.
And on one of the shows one day, he referred to the woman who was married to Jay-Z as Beyonce

Speaker 4 because all he does is read. That's all he does is read.
It's to his credit. Taylor Lorenz is the opposite of Victor Davis Hansen.
She reads nothing.

Speaker 4 She just pulls out her hair, feels sorry for herself, cries on TV, doxes innocent innocent people who happen to write conservative things, and then defend cold-blooded accused killers, Walter, as good-looking, morally good, famous, revolutionary, smart.

Speaker 4 It's so hard to find.

Speaker 2 Well, of course, this is all a put-on.

Speaker 2 And I think, Megan, your experience in news and opinion reveals that to you too.

Speaker 2 There were many people they could have interviewed about Luigi Mangione, but they picked Taylor Lorenz because she could be counted on to

Speaker 2 model this kind of goofy, teenage, Beatlemania, Manson girl fandom that would set the internet on fire. CNN will set itself on fire if it can get ratings at this point.
And they just did that.

Speaker 2 She got on my Twitter this morning because I made you know, I made adequate fun of this thing. And she said, I wasn't talking about myself.
These aren't my feelings.

Speaker 2 I was just observing what's going on among young women. But that's not it at all.
What she's doing is she's modeling the kind of reaction that you're now allowed to have to Luigi.

Speaker 2 Them sort of, you know, being like they're on a date.

Speaker 2 joking at the bar about something and you know their dating life or whatever was supposed to show america that you can be lighthearted and fun and teeny bopper about this subject but what they had to say really didn't matter.

Speaker 2 It was the way they said it and the way they laughed and the way they made everyone, they gave everyone permission to sort of have this strange tiger beat feelings about Luigi.

Speaker 4 Tiger beat. Yeah, Sean Cassidy and Robbie Benson and John Travolta.
That's how old I am, guys.

Speaker 4 It's a lie that she was just parroting what others might say about Luigi. Here is what Taylor Lorenz said

Speaker 4 right after the murder. I mean, in hours after Thompson was killed, Brian Thompson was killed, allegedly by Luigi.

Speaker 4 She got online and expressed her dismay with the healthcare, health industry, insurance industry.

Speaker 4 What happened was somebody posted on Blue Sky, Blue Cross, Blue Shield in Connecticut, New York, and Missouri has declared it will no longer pay for anesthesia for the full length of some surgeries.

Speaker 4 Lorenz replied, and people wonder why we want these executives dead.

Speaker 4 Following that, she went viral for a comment on Piers Morgan, where she said, quote, I do believe in the sanctity of life, and I think that's why I felt, along with so many other Americans, joy, unfortunately, joy upon learning that Brian Thompson, father of two boys, had been murdered, gunned down in his prime.

Speaker 4 She made her super joyful. So, Walter, don't give her one inch.
She doesn't deserve it.

Speaker 2 Oh, I didn't give her an inch, but I noticed something. She has replies turned off.
If she doesn't follow you on Twitter, you're not even allowed to talk back at her.

Speaker 2 And yet she's celebrating people who shoot others. I mean, this is a phobic, fragile,

Speaker 2 you know, retarded person who

Speaker 4 people at FDA walk out on you.

Speaker 2 I mean it in the classical sense, that her growth is stunted.

Speaker 2 You know, not that she suffers from any sort of genetic syndrome, though that may be classical.

Speaker 4 Retarded can mean slow as an actual word, like the process of that automobile was retarded by the nails in the road.

Speaker 2 But it was, it was the host who is really, is really to be deplored. I mean, she's, she's out there doing her act, you know, trying to get attention for her new independent journalism career.

Speaker 2 But that guy, not,

Speaker 2 he complied with it. He, he, he fanned it.
He, he emphasized,

Speaker 4 amplified amplified it. That's what he was there for.
Yeah, that's, that's the thing.

Speaker 4 So, and by the way, pro tip for you, Donnie, the way to get more women swiping right on your profile is not to suggest you think it's hilarious when people kill innocent men on the street.

Speaker 4 And that, that's an awesome, like, ha ha ha, lucky him. This is such a fun conversation.
Maybe that's how I'll get more girls. It's a no.

Speaker 4 Maybe you do want to wind up with like a tailor, maybe that kind of girl, but not with normal red-blooded American women.

Speaker 4 Matt, let's speak to you.

Speaker 2 I I got the feeling he wanted Louisi to swipe right on his.

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 4 that could be. That could also be.
Might as well go there since we brought it up. RFKJ is the subject of an unfair, untrue smear.

Speaker 4 On Friday, he went over to FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, now run by Marty McCary, yay, of Johns Hopkins, one of the few sane voices during COVID. and

Speaker 4 did like a rally the troops kind of message, you know, like stand tall and, you know, be careful of disinformation and people trying to corrupt you, that like good stuff.

Speaker 4 And made a reference, as he has so many times. If you've interviewed RFKJ, you've heard him make this reference to this like home quote for the retarded.

Speaker 4 That was the name of the home that he volunteered at when he was young. And he talks about the special Olympics, which was started by his family and so on.

Speaker 4 And Q, the newspaper articles, he used the R word to describe children or, you know, people with disabilities. He used the R word.

Speaker 4 Notwithstanding the fact that that wasn't true, he was making a reference again to this group. Hold on, I'll find it.

Speaker 4 Here it is.

Speaker 4 Okay, here are a couple of headlines. Mediaites Sarah Rumpf.

Speaker 4 FDA staffers dish an unhinged meeting with RFK Jr., where he called Special Olympics athletes retarded.

Speaker 4 Then, after the truth came out, she later updated the headline to FDA staffer's dish on Unhinged meeting with RFK Jr., quote, the deep state is real, without an acknowledgement.

Speaker 4 We'll go back and check it again, Sarah, that she said something that was false and potentially defamatory against him in her original headline, which was so wrong, they had to take it down.

Speaker 4 Now, when you do that, you then need to fix it. You need to acknowledge your mistake and fix it.
It's not that hard.

Speaker 4 Daily Beast, Beast, staffers walk out of RFKJ's slur-ridden speech about the deep state. Slur-ridden.
Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action, who is a complete hack.

Speaker 4 This is a woman who used to run this group that didn't want guns available to children, particularly in the school setting, sounded normal. She turns out to be a far-left hack.

Speaker 4 partisan, dishonest person.

Speaker 4 During remarks to FDA employees today, RFKJ touted his work for the Special Olympics, but shocked several FDA employees when he said he spent 200 hours in high school working with, quote, the retarded.

Speaker 4 Again, at our last check, the tweet was still up. No clarification.
Here's what he actually said.

Speaker 4 And by the way, Politico was the original sinner on this. They're the ones who got this going.
Here's what he actually said.

Speaker 4 Because of my family's commitment to these issues, I spent 200 hours at the Wasaic Home for the Retarded when I was in high school.

Speaker 4 I guarantee you I could tell my team to pull the clip when he said that on me and on other people's shows. Like, this is so messed up.
And there was an audio recording, too.

Speaker 4 We're told that there was an audio recording of his remarks there. Political went on.

Speaker 4 to say the remark jolted several FDA employees in the audience who misheard the reference and thought he was making a derogatory remark about people with intellectual disabilities, according to two employees granted anonymity, for fear of retaliation.

Speaker 4 Gee, why did you think that? What do you think it is about RFKJ that led them to believe he slurred when it comes to people with mental disabilities in front of the entire FDA staff, Walter?

Speaker 4 That's the thing that's so ridiculous about it. Like, and then he dropped the N-word.
You know, like,

Speaker 4 what other things would, you know, your average

Speaker 4 cabinet secretary do in front of hundreds of new employees other than find groups to slur?

Speaker 2 You know, it's so ironic that the person who is doing his level best and has committed his life and his fortune at this point to stopping autism is going to be harassed for having

Speaker 4 just how significant the

Speaker 2 properly quoted the name of

Speaker 2 an institution.

Speaker 2 I think, first of all, every generation should be allowed to have the vocabulary that it did when it was 30 years old.

Speaker 2 And,

Speaker 2 you know, not that he said the word, but that he wasn't afraid to say it, even though it was the name of something, probably comes from the fact that he lived at a time when that's how people spoke.

Speaker 2 Having to reset to the beliefs and the speech,

Speaker 2 the speech sensitivities of 22-year-olds forever is getting old.

Speaker 4 Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 4 they didn't give him a fair chance, of course, Matt. They're not going to give him a fair chance, but they'll use anything to smear him.

Speaker 4 This is another version of binders full of women, which is proof that Mitt Romney is this raging sexist. It's kind of another version of good people, you know, very fine people on both sides.

Speaker 4 You know, these lies that they make up based on one word that they pull and then twist. And, you know, what is it? Like about you can't put on your pants on before the lie spreads around the world.

Speaker 4 And Politico is very well read. And I'm sure, in defense of these others who just ran with it, they went off of the Politico piece, which was what got the whole thing started.

Speaker 4 They later did clarify, writing for the record, this article and headline have been updated to make clear that Kennedy was referring to the Wasaic State School for the Mentally Retarded, where he worked in high school, not using a derogatory term for people with intellectual disabilities.

Speaker 2 Yeah, oddly, this ties back to the Taylor Lorenz story because she was famous, among other things, for a piece she did years ago where she

Speaker 2 sort of hit out in the new app Clubhouse and claimed to overhear Mark Andreessen using what she called the R slur.

Speaker 4 Good memory.

Speaker 2 She posted a tweet of all the people who didn't do anything when the R slur was used.

Speaker 2 Now, it turned out that it wasn't Andreessen who used the word, and it was actually a quote, a self-referential quote involving a group of Redditors who described their

Speaker 2 sort of GameStop

Speaker 2 stock ploy as like the revolution of the retarded or something like that. And so the question was, what do we think about this retarded revolution or something along those lines?

Speaker 2 And so the whole thing had to be kind of retracted, corrected, clarified, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 2 But what's interesting about that is that at the time, there was this concerted effort to define the harm standard as even using

Speaker 2 this old word in a private setting, essentially, was somehow not even acceptable. Like the argument was we can't have

Speaker 2 apps like Clubhouse because people will be doing this all the time behind closed doors. We go from that to it's okay to shoot people in broad daylight

Speaker 2 if, you know, and that's a morally good person who does that.

Speaker 2 So there's harm over here,

Speaker 2 which she later described as the reaction to that is destroying her life to, you know, to this thing, which is a completely different idea about what harm is.

Speaker 2 It's mind-boggling.

Speaker 4 You guys just did,

Speaker 4 did you do this on your show or did you write, Did you write something on this? I can't remember.

Speaker 4 But on the NPR That's Not Funny challenge.

Speaker 2 Oh, that was that was me. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Okay.
Cause I subscribe and I get it via email, Matt. I subscribe to

Speaker 4 almost nobody's email. You should be honored because I do not like to clog up my inbox, but I do subscribe to yours.

Speaker 4 So sometimes I don't know whether it's quotes from the show or whether it's just you.

Speaker 4 But this is seem, this also seems related to me because NPR has like re-upped this old show that it put out.

Speaker 4 It's the That's Not Funny challenge, and in which they advise parents who may be concerned that their children may become murderers to keep them away from problematic jokes.

Speaker 4 Like, you can't say the R word, or God knows where things will go.

Speaker 4 And you definitely can't have a child who thinks Hitler's mustache is funny, or you might have, you know, the next one of two things, Republican president or serial killer.

Speaker 4 In the eyes of NPR, it's the same thing. And they really want, in today's day and age,

Speaker 4 to warn parents about the warning signs of your son becoming an incel murderer, as you put it in the piece.

Speaker 4 And it's probably, it starts with bad jokes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it was really an amazing thing because what they did is in response to the popularity of the Netflix show Adolescence,

Speaker 2 which Keir Starmer is now going to mandate that every secondary school student in the UK has to watch.

Speaker 2 The story is basically about

Speaker 2 a beatific young boy who is moved to knife crime or murder against a young girl because he listens to Andrew Tate, basically,

Speaker 2 sort of misogynistic online content. and so they they regurgitated this whole um

Speaker 2 interview they did two years ago about the dangers of that kind of content and this expert on online radicalization by the way who where do you go to get that job um expert in online radicalization anyway

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's so bizarre.

Speaker 2 And the whole thing was about how the first thing you have to do is make sure, is monitor your children for any signs that they are laughing at inappropriate humor or calling things that really aren't funny funny like for instance finding hitler's anyone ever had an eight or nine year old boy literally every single piece of humor is inappropriate every single everything is funny and and they singled out hitler's mustache which walter i don't know or megan actually both of you i I would think is one of the funniest things that's ever existed is Hitler's mustache.

Speaker 4 It's a very strange choice by a very strange man.

Speaker 2 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 If your eight-year-old boy doesn't think Hitler's mustache is funny, that's one I would call a psychiatrist, actually.

Speaker 4 I mean, honestly, it's like, but you point out in this piece, and it's so true that, like, for decades now, especially when we all grew up, think of the things that we were listening to.

Speaker 4 Go back, and I dare anybody to go back,

Speaker 4 start the original Bad News Bears. Just hit play on the original bad news bears.
You don't have to go two minutes in to hear every slur there is.

Speaker 4 The slurs for Hispanics, the slurs for blacks, the slurs for gays, all of them right there from like right out of the barn. You're like, whoa, never mind.

Speaker 4 We're going to try something else when you have little kids. We didn't all turn into psychopathic murderers, Walter, but NPR is really worried about inappropriate humor.

Speaker 2 Remember that TV movie, The Boy in the Bubble?

Speaker 4 It wasn't

Speaker 2 an immune system, so they had to be completely encased in a sterile capsule. Well, that's what they're trying to do to kids now.

Speaker 2 They're the boy in the bubble. They don't have immune systems.
They can't figure things out. They can't reject bad ideas.

Speaker 2 They can't distinguish between sick humor that's just funny and actually killing someone for kicks.

Speaker 2 And so we're going to keep them in the bubble and it's going to be zip tight and the parents are going to check in every few hours to make sure there are no holes in it.

Speaker 2 Well, what happens to that is your kid develops absolutely no immunity and will go out into the world and probably go crazy almost instantly once they're out of the controlled environment.

Speaker 2 So I see toughen your kids up, use the old

Speaker 2 standard of exposing them to everything. You know, let them smoke cigarettes and get sick.
Let them have a drink and throw up and let them laugh at Hitler's mustache. They'll be good people someday.

Speaker 2 The other thing is going to create freaks.

Speaker 4 Yeah, right. Honestly, they need bad humor.
They need to be able to make fun of each other. They need to be able to touch the untouchable or it becomes too important to them.

Speaker 4 It becomes like larger than life.

Speaker 4 And as usual, NPR's advice is totally wrong. An update for you, Shannon Watts has still not taken down her post.
MediaIT has now added the political clarification that I read to you earlier.

Speaker 4 That's not good enough. You have to say, as we reported, what we reported was wrong.
It ends with he was referencing this school, not using a derogatory term for people with intellectual disabilities.

Speaker 4 And then you just need to add, as we earlier reported, we misled you. That's it.
We were sorry. We fucked up.
We listened to Politico. I mean, that you know,

Speaker 2 Politico restated the name of the institution in its article and therefore is as guilty of exactly the same crime as RFK.

Speaker 4 Really not? No, they kicked it off.

Speaker 4 Exactly, yes, but they don't own that piece of it. Hold that thought.
Quick break. More back with Matt and Walter after this.

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Speaker 4 Now, I have been dying to get back from break because I missed serious gold in the Blue Origin story that my team has redirected me to. And now I will bring you guys there as well.

Speaker 4 Take a listen to the female commentators.

Speaker 4 As this

Speaker 4 nipple-shaped rocket ship was about to take off And the two commentators, I had to know their names when I heard this.

Speaker 4 I'm told by Steve Krakauer include Teresa Thompson, who normally works with ESBN Sports, and Kristen Fisher, who used to be on Fox but then went to CNN.

Speaker 4 But both of them, we believe, are just doing like blue origin announcing on this particular day, like not working for an outlet. So obviously hired by Bezos to do this.

Speaker 4 And would you listen to the commentary, guys?

Speaker 6 And when you are out there at this moment, this rocket feels like it is alive. It feels like it is a living

Speaker 14 thing, right? And there's the gantry pulling back.

Speaker 12 And this right here is the moment that they've been training for.

Speaker 4 Training.

Speaker 12 Two days, becoming a crew, becoming a team.

Speaker 15 After you go through an experience like this, it's more than a team. It's almost like a family.
You are so tight to go through something as intense as

Speaker 15 absolute, you know, as you said, this is like a bridled beast. This thing wants to take off.

Speaker 16 Switch to onboard helium.

Speaker 6 Here we go.

Speaker 6 Good luck and Godspeed, ladies.

Speaker 12 We're cheering you on.

Speaker 13 Let's launch this for us.

Speaker 4 Oh my God.

Speaker 4 Their training

Speaker 4 they did two days. And I asked my team to pull, like, what did they do during their two days? Okay, here they are.

Speaker 4 Their tasks, they spent the past two days at facilities for Blue Origin going over preparations, according to Blue Origin's Ariane Cornell. Their tasks included

Speaker 4 practicing how to get into and out of the new Shepherd Capsule.

Speaker 4 You go in,

Speaker 4 then you go out. Oh, once again, ladies.
Okay.

Speaker 4 The group also practiced how to put on and take off their seat belts.

Speaker 4 I'm dying. I'm dying.
Let me see if there's anything else.

Speaker 4 Oh, they had to get fitted in their flight suits, guys. They had to get fitted and they had to learn how to communicate with ground control.
That,

Speaker 4 okay, this is what's so funny about it to me. First of all, these two nitwits talking about the training they've been through, all their training, it all comes down to this.

Speaker 4 Secondly, isn't that was like astronaut training, the universal phrase for something that's extremely physically taxing on you?

Speaker 4 They used to like stick the astronauts in these booths and like put it, like make it sub-zero temperatures and then make them super confused.

Speaker 4 They couldn't like perform simple tasks anymore and then like make their hearing go away. They would deprive you sensory deprivation, one sense after the other, and that's like part of the.

Speaker 4 And now it's like they had to learn how to get in,

Speaker 4 get in and out, but they dress it up on the one thing by saying they had to learn egress and ingress. That's astronaut talk,

Speaker 4 and they'd click in and out of their seatbelts. And then the other girl going on about how

Speaker 4 after you go through an experience like that, you are more than a team. You are a family.

Speaker 4 That egress and ingress and seatbelt buckling than lying down in your Oscar de la Renta suit.

Speaker 4 Walter's just got his finger on his face.

Speaker 2 Just a few weeks ago, actual astronauts who got stranded in space for months, floating around in weightless condition, not in this, you know, luxury vehicle, were rescued by another rocket and brought back to Earth.

Speaker 2 And it hardly made a splash on the media. These people have already gotten 50 times the publicity that those

Speaker 2 heroes and the person who rescued them got.

Speaker 4 Yeah, ISS and Elon, right?

Speaker 2 The people who are on the show. Bezos basically put his girl, his girlfriend and her pals into a giant vibrator, shot them into orbit for 10 minutes, and they came back telling all about the thrill.

Speaker 2 We've got everything upside down. And if women get any more empowerment of this sort, they're going to be denied the right to vote.

Speaker 2 I love the color commentary, though. It's, you know,

Speaker 2 speaking with knowledge as if they know what this is like generally.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 4 I was like, are these astronauts?

Speaker 4 Are these? No, it's like some girl from ESPN and some girl from CNN. Like, oh, let me tell you what the training does for you on something like this.
Hello? what?

Speaker 2 It's

Speaker 2 crazy. It's like, you know, when you, when you go to get a Chevy Traverse test drive, you come out more like a family than like, uh, you know,

Speaker 2 somebody who just took a car.

Speaker 4 I mean, like, they're talking about getting in and out of a car, uh, basically. All their training, it comes down to this.
Can we hear the beginning of that again? I need to hear that again.

Speaker 4 Just let's just play it again.

Speaker 12 Egress.

Speaker 6 When you are out there at this moment, this rocket feels like it is alive. It feels like it is a living,

Speaker 14 capsule active thing, right? And there's the gantry pulling back.

Speaker 12 And this right here is the moment that they've been training for.

Speaker 12 Two days, becoming a crew, becoming a team. Two days.

Speaker 15 After you go through an experience like this, it's more than a team. It's almost like a family.
You are so tight to go through

Speaker 15 something as intense as an absolute, you know, as you said, this is like bridled beast this this thing wants to take off switch to onboard helium here we go that's the sexual part

Speaker 13 godspeed ladies we're cheering you on from let's launch this for the rough termination system is armed

Speaker 4 i i can't the drama that's also like a stereotypically female thing which is not great right to be overly dramatic when the circumstances don't call for it.

Speaker 4 I'm not saying what they were doing was guaranteed safe. Obviously, we have seen accidents before.

Speaker 4 It's not like there was some degree of risk there, but the training, it all comes down to literally they learned how to buckle their seat belts

Speaker 4 and wear the suits that were designer and showed Lauren Sanchez's boobs. Okay,

Speaker 4 no one's going to convince me that those rockets are not phallic.

Speaker 4 I think we're all just part of some weird Jeff Bezos sexual fantasy right now. I really do.
There's something happening there.

Speaker 4 I don't wish to participate. Okay, there's a lot of other news.
You wouldn't know it. But first, I got to spend a minute on you, Matt Taibbi, because you were mentioned last week on our show.

Speaker 4 We were talking about, speaking of politico, a political report about

Speaker 4 anonymous, that guy who worked within the government, who came out during the Trump administration, was like, those of us at DHS, Miles Taylor, we... We're handling him behind the scenes.

Speaker 4 Like we've really got control of the government. Anyway, that guy left government service in 2019 and turned out to be like a nothing burger.

Speaker 4 He was nowhere near as important as he would have had us believe.

Speaker 4 And Trump just revoked his security clearance, which no one knows why he still had it anyway, and said, I want an investigation to see if he used any classified info.

Speaker 4 So with respect to that guy and somebody else who worked for Trump, he wanted some government snooping around to see if they had done anything wrong. And he's not charging anybody.

Speaker 4 He's doing some like kicking of the tires. And Politico, in response to this, writes this article:

Speaker 4 Never before has the White House leaned on the DOJ or one of its top agencies to investigate a private citizen in retaliation for something that citizen has allegedly done.

Speaker 4 And I was like, why don't you tell it to James O'Keefe and Matt Taibbi?

Speaker 4 And I read them Ron Johnson's press release the day you testified at that hearing on the weaponization of government, only to go home and get a visit from the IRS.

Speaker 4 And Ron Johnson was saying, there is zero chance this is coincidental. And then, sure enough, you got audited.

Speaker 4 They began at least an audit. So, I would love to know your thoughts on that political assertion and whether that has resolved now and the government is finally off your back.

Speaker 2 They are.

Speaker 2 I was actually told at the end of that month, so that happened on I think March 9th of 2023.

Speaker 2 By the end of the month, they told me that I was in the clear. They actually owed me a lot of money.

Speaker 2 And the investigation had been started up on the same day as one of the main Twitter files reports.

Speaker 2 And once the Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the Treasury asking basically what the deal was, they sent over a whole bunch of documents

Speaker 2 and conceded that there was nothing there and then informed me personally that I was in the clear. So I'm not being investigated anymore.

Speaker 2 And then thanks to Jim Jordan, actually, they changed the policy about

Speaker 2 personal visits to people by the IRS. So that was actually a positive outcome to that whole thing.

Speaker 4 Wow. I mean, what are your thoughts then that

Speaker 4 this by Trump is the first time it's ever happened?

Speaker 2 Clearly not.

Speaker 2 You know, I think we can go back through history and find many examples of people who've been investigated.

Speaker 2 You know, at least the DOJ has been nudged in the direction of somebody. I mean, I think that's been a feature of almost every presidential administration going back to Nixon.

Speaker 2 Am I wrong about that, Walter? I can't think of anybody who hasn't been in trouble for that.

Speaker 2 But,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 that whole thing,

Speaker 2 Miles Taylor, you know, he's a character.

Speaker 2 He was a significant character in the Twitter files. We didn't do a lot of the reports on those,

Speaker 2 but I know that there was talk about investigating him even

Speaker 2 before the end of Trump's first term. So

Speaker 4 I'm sure there was.

Speaker 4 By the way,

Speaker 4 just in case the audience doesn't remember, Twitter files, of course, is the release of all sorts of files at Twitter, now X, by Elon once he took it over, showing massive government coordination with social media companies, including X, to do things like stifle all free discussion around COVID and many other subjects.

Speaker 4 Sorry, go ahead, Walter. What were you going to say?

Speaker 2 Well, maybe I don't understand security clearances, but I thought the deal was you get one and then you get to look at stuff that you're not allowed to talk about.

Speaker 2 This guy may not have talked about

Speaker 2 classified information, but he did open his mouth very loudly and against his commander-in-chief at the time or you know his executive and why he would expect that he would not become a target once he's outed the reason he was anonymous is that he was afraid of what he was doing um then he got de-anonymized and and and they're looking into him uh

Speaker 2 that makes him a victim of some kind uh and why do you keep these clearances for life i don't understand that at all i mean i don't get it either

Speaker 2 they walk around with them apparently they're a great way to earn money because you know

Speaker 2 yeah, they're a subsidy to people. It's sort of like an honorary badge that you can use for the rest of your life.
And people who want you to look at classified things, I guess, can have you do that.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 I think they should probably expire and not need to be taken away.

Speaker 4 I agree. And then you can get it on a case-by-case basis, but that seems to be plenty.
Now, not

Speaker 4 content to have had your first, or at least probably wasn't your first, Matt, but your most recent appearance before Congress result in a scary visit from the IRS. You went back to Congress.

Speaker 4 You've been back a few times. And the most recent one was

Speaker 4 just a couple of months ago, I believe, whereupon,

Speaker 4 well, you got at this hearing called

Speaker 4 a serial sexual harasser by some far-left California Democrat named Representative Sidney Kamlager

Speaker 4 who I'll state up front had zero evidence to support that defamatory claim she just pulled out of thin air to smear Matt Taibbi in a congressional hearing. Matt didn't love it.
Here's what happened.

Speaker 4 Watch.

Speaker 17 The majority is relitigating a made-up conspiracy theory about a part of the State Department that no longer exists to distract from the dumpster fire foreign policy this administration is pursuing and elevating a serial sexual harasser as their star witness in the process.

Speaker 17 Mr. Chair, I request unanimous consent to enter into the record two articles about the Republican witness Matt Taibbi.

Speaker 17 The first is a Chicago Reader article entitled, 20 Years Ago in Moscow, Matt Taibbi was a misogynist a-hole, and possibly worse, and a Washington Post article titled, The Two Expat Bros Who Terrorized Women Correspondents in Moscow.

Speaker 4 So, you did what very few people will do when they've been smeared, and you actually filed a lawsuit because while she has a congressional privilege to say all sorts of nonsense when she's in that seat, she repeated the smears on social media.

Speaker 4 I looked into this recently, and the privilege still may exist, but not to the same extent as it does when they're in their congressional seat.

Speaker 4 She exposed herself by repeating that online, and you're suing her for 10 million bucks. So, what's behind that? Why did you decide to do that?

Speaker 2 Well, when this story first came out in 2017, it's based on a single passage in a book that I co-wrote with my former co-editor in Moscow.

Speaker 2 And it's completely fictional, like almost everything else in The Exile. I mean, The Exile was a

Speaker 2 satirical newspaper where everything was basically backwards. The whole idea was an un-newspaper.

Speaker 2 So, like, for instance, the corrections always always referred to things that had never actually been in the newspaper. Most of the bylines were of fake people describing fake adventures.

Speaker 2 And in one passage, Mark describes something that it didn't happen. It's a massive exaggeration of something.
And so all the people who were involved were eventually contacted at that time.

Speaker 2 They recanted. There were corrections at the time.

Speaker 2 I was in litigation with some newspapers at the time.

Speaker 2 That's all been done and finished. And nobody's ever accused me of sexual harassment here or in Russia.

Speaker 4 Not even during the Me Too movement.

Speaker 2 None of that stuff.

Speaker 2 I'm one of those people who goes straight home from work, doesn't socialize, nothing.

Speaker 2 But I knew in the hearing.

Speaker 2 As soon as she said that, I thought about the speech and debate clause and I realized that she's allowed to say that.

Speaker 2 And then on the way home i i saw um that she was retweeting this i think in an effort to try to get a rise out of me because she said something along the lines of um you know my silence in the hearing was telling uh but i think i think that the privilege is penetrated once you go outside Congress and start retweeting on X and Blue Sky.

Speaker 2 And I'd had enough at that point of this thing. This thing did major damage to my life and career, and it's not true.
And so,

Speaker 2 you know, for her to drag this up seven years later, it's, I, I just, I just ran out of patience.

Speaker 4 Good for you. No, I remember looking at this

Speaker 4 when I can't remember whether it was Dick Blumenthal or

Speaker 4 Tim Kaine, but one of them had said to Pete Hegseth, had suggested that he was beating his wife in the in the hearing or an ex-wife. I mean, like the literal, like classic defamatory statement.
And

Speaker 4 they can be protected. These guys can do whatever they want.
It's disgusting. But then they repeated it on social media.
And I remember saying, you know, he should sue.

Speaker 4 And some smart lawyers responded saying, well, it's protected because of speech and debate. And I actually spent some time looking into it

Speaker 4 because I didn't think social media would qualify. And I did find a lot of big loopholes that you could drive a truck through.
You are far less protected when you are tweeting as a congressman.

Speaker 4 on X or on Blue Sky than you are when you're in that seat. And I think she's in for a whole messy legal battle that she didn't anticipate.
So, good for you because no one ever fights back, Matt.

Speaker 4 No one ever fights back.

Speaker 4 Have you had any response from her or her team?

Speaker 2 Well, I probably can't get into that publicly, but

Speaker 2 what I will say is that there was a lot of positive response about this. And part of that was from other journalists because,

Speaker 2 you know, I don't know if you agree with this,

Speaker 2 but I think there's been kind of a laissez-faire attitude toward outright libel in the last eight, nine years. People just say such crazy things

Speaker 2 online. And there's this attitude that we don't have to back it up.
We don't have to make notations when we make corrections. We don't have to leave it on the page

Speaker 2 to tell people that we made a mistake before.

Speaker 2 We can say what we want and get away with it. Most people won't sue.

Speaker 2 And I think you have to, because that's the argument for not censoring is this other system actually works. And,

Speaker 2 you know, as somebody who's very against censorship, I think when people do that, that kind of thing, you have to try to hold them accountable.

Speaker 4 So, Matt's too much of a gentleman to say what he really thinks, Walter, but what did you make of that exchange?

Speaker 2 Well, Matt is a gentleman, as testified by the fact he's only suing her for 10 million. I mean, we live in the day of billion-dollar lawsuits.
I think Trump just went after CBS for billions.

Speaker 2 You know, Alex Jones coughed up, Fox coughed up to Dominion.

Speaker 2 But the damage to Matt, his family, his children, you know, and so on from that charge, which was completely unfounded, is worth, I think, a lot more than that. So

Speaker 2 he's really being a Boy Scout by asking for so little.

Speaker 2 When I heard it,

Speaker 2 I have a lot of friends who

Speaker 2 watch our podcast and they started texting me saying, I can't watch this. Poor Matt, he's sitting up there, you know, and I thought to myself, well, you know, he likes it.

Speaker 2 He knows what's going to happen now. It's an adventure for him.
Last time the IRS came, this time they libeled him. They might pull out a gun next time.
I mean, he's driving Congress crazy.

Speaker 4 Yeah. And it was just, it was a hearing on the censorship industrial complex, the need for First Amendment safeguards at the State Department.
I mean, it's really, that's kind of a no-brainer.

Speaker 4 Of course, we need First Amendment safeguards. We've been through quite a lot of censorship.
That's what the Twitter files showed, among other things.

Speaker 4 And instead of taking any sort of a lesson and listening open-mindedly, she decided to go to the politics of personal destruction. And it was despicable.
She decided to do

Speaker 2 that actually violates the First Amendment.

Speaker 4 I mean, in the sense that, you know, the irony.

Speaker 2 Yeah, the irony.

Speaker 2 No censorship for her, only for others, I guess.

Speaker 4 Okay, moving on.

Speaker 2 Yeah, just quickly is that, you know, from the very beginning, I know when I testified about the Twitter files, you know, two years ago,

Speaker 2 the Democrats treated me almost like I was worse than a Trump supporter.

Speaker 2 To them, they think of me as some kind of apostate, but I've been a lifelong supporter of the First Amendment. I've been a Democrat most of my life.

Speaker 2 I'd probably agree with them about some things if they... wanted to open a discussion about what's appropriate for online regulation, but they

Speaker 2 decided to go completely in a different direction. And the political sense of that escapes me.
I just don't understand why they did it.

Speaker 4 Well, I guarantee you that woman did no research

Speaker 4 on you, other than, you know, smear research, stuff that she could get to smear you.

Speaker 4 She wasn't interested in probing who you actually are or what your views are. And she was too dumb to know you.
So, you know, all of it reflected very poorly on her. And I think it will continue to.

Speaker 4 Okay, a couple other things. This just in,

Speaker 4 the president of El Salvador was at the White House this morning and met with President Trump.

Speaker 4 This is the guy who's taking our Venezuelan gang members and other illegals into this controversial prison, which does not look like a day at the park. And

Speaker 4 one of the guys that we deported, this guy last name, Obrego Garcia, is at the center of the controversy now because the Supreme Court, just to be clear, has already ruled that Trump can use the

Speaker 4 Alien Enemies Act to deport these people. And what process they'll get before we deport them? The answer is some, and we'll figure out how much, but I guarantee it's not going to be much.

Speaker 4 It's not going to be much. Immigrants we're trying to kick out get a very minimous level of due process.
It's not like you or the three of us would get in a court of law accused of crimes.

Speaker 4 That's the highest level. By the way, an illegal accused of a crime who's tried in a court would get the same level of due process in a criminal court as we would too.

Speaker 4 But on deportation hearings, it's a quickie, you know, what do we know? What don't we know? Get out. And then they usually stay.

Speaker 4 Okay, so what happened with this guy was he was brought over when he was like 15 or 16 by his parents from El Salvador and

Speaker 4 then grew up to allegedly become part of MS-13 here in America, down in Virginia or Maryland around there. And

Speaker 4 he got pinpointed as a potentially, you know, problematic guy, as a gang member, potentially, and dragged into immigration court. And we had an immigration proceeding against him.

Speaker 4 We didn't like have a criminal proceeding against him. And then it went up on appeal within the immigration system.

Speaker 4 And two courts, the lower court and the upper court, found that he had enough gang ties that they were convinced he was a member of MS-13. They took witness testimony from a confidential informant.

Speaker 4 And apparently, even El Salvador says he was a member of MS-13.

Speaker 4 So he was ordered to be deported. Get out.
Now he's in his mid-20s. Please leave.
And only, this took a while, all these proceedings. and only on the eve of his deportation did he say,

Speaker 4 I, it was basically an asylum claim. You can't claim asylum in the United States unless you claim it within like the first year of being here, which he missed.

Speaker 4 But so it wasn't asylum exactly, but it was like, I need humanitarian relief. You can't send me back to El Salvador.

Speaker 4 And the reason is that there's this terrible gang there that wants to kill me and my whole family. We were making some sort of a food.
They like to make that food.

Speaker 4 They didn't want my family to make the food. My mother,

Speaker 4 my brother, me, well, I'll be dead if you send me back to El Salvador. And some judge was like, okay,

Speaker 4 and gave him this order of suspended removal where

Speaker 4 we could still deport him. We could send him to any country in the world that would have him, but we can't send him to El Salvador because of this judge's order.

Speaker 4 At least then, if circumstances change, you can send him back to El Salvador.

Speaker 4 And by the way, that gang that was allegedly targeting him that he forgot to mention during two long immigration removal hearings, Never mentioned once, only came up once he'd lost and he was ordered deported, no longer exists.

Speaker 4 So our government very easily could have gone back into immigration court and gotten an order saying the removal suspension's lifted. You're going home, buddy.

Speaker 4 But now he's like been removed thanks to Trump. And he's playing the, I'm an American.
I have kids. One may be special needs.
This is so wrong. I'm just a dreamer.

Speaker 4 Forget all those allegations about me being part of MS-13 that two courts found were real, that El Salvador says are real.

Speaker 4 It was never found by a criminal court, so it can't be real, and we think the evidence is sketchy. And I'm an American, send me back home, which he's not.
He's an El Salvadoran.

Speaker 4 That's the synopsis, by the way, the one the media won't give you about this guy, Obrego Garcia, who's become the left wing's poster boy for wrongful deportations.

Speaker 4 The left has taken this case up. They got an order from a lower court judge saying we have to.

Speaker 4 We have to

Speaker 4 make sure that he gets deported. That we have, sorry, returned, returned to the United United States from this El Salvadoran prison, to which we were not allowed to deport him, technically.
And

Speaker 4 the Supreme Court took it up and said, all right, you have to help facilitate his removal, but you don't have to ensure it. You don't have to actually execute on it.
That's somebody else's job.

Speaker 4 But you, United States government, you do have to help facilitate. his removal from that prison and return.
And that was a lower burden than the left wanted.

Speaker 4 They wanted, you have to make sure he gets back here. And the Supreme Court would not give that.
So that's where the case stands now.

Speaker 4 As Bukele, the president of El Salvador, shows up at the White House. And all the left was saying, why don't you just put him on your plane?

Speaker 4 Put this gang member on the El Salvadoran president's plane and bring him back. Well, that didn't happen.
And the news just out of the oval is as follows. Watch.

Speaker 18 Well, you can't, I'm supposed to not suggest that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States, right?

Speaker 18 How can I return him to the United States? Like, I smuggle him into the United States, or whether I do it first, I'm not going to do it.

Speaker 11 It's like, I mean,

Speaker 18 the question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States? I don't have the power to return him to the United States.

Speaker 4 And now it's a very interesting legal thicket because Trump is saying, Team Trump, Stephen Miller,

Speaker 4 saying

Speaker 4 we don't have the authority to go into a foreign government, a foreign nation, and

Speaker 4 take someone who is a Salvadoran citizen who has no citizenry here and bring him back to the United States.

Speaker 4 We don't have that authority.

Speaker 4 And now you hear the Salvadoran president saying, we don't have authority to take someone who's been said to be a gang member and adjudicated by President Trump by executive order, a terrorist, and drop him back off into the United States.

Speaker 4 And that's where things stand.

Speaker 4 Now it's getting really interesting to me. Thoughts on it, guys?

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 one of the terrible effects of unconstrained immigration and illegal immigration is that every one of those people represents a

Speaker 2 total tie-up of our court system. I mean, that we are spending this amount of time, this amount of care, this amount of

Speaker 2 media space on a gang member

Speaker 2 or an alleged gang member.

Speaker 4 But definitely an illegal. Definitely

Speaker 4 illegal. A deportation order saddled illegal.

Speaker 2 Is an argument for there really being a very strict and, like you say, deminimist process for, I think,

Speaker 2 getting him out of here because we can't.

Speaker 2 afford these resources. We can't afford this divisive argument and this legal quagmire over every single person.
And,

Speaker 2 you know, this is not somebody to embrace for the left.

Speaker 2 You know, and that they want immediate results from a U.S. government that takes forever to get you a, you know, get you a permit for something or whatever is ridiculous.

Speaker 2 These are the kind of issues that no matter what Trump does are going to keep the left and the Democrats in the minority for a long time.

Speaker 4 Matt, it's very interesting because Trump got an an order last week, late last week from the high court saying the deportation of the Columbia University agitator, Mahmoud Khalil, the guy who was the spokesperson for the on-campus group of Columbia that overtook that building, Hamilton Hall, and held people hostage and defamed the bill or defaced the building.

Speaker 4 That Trump and Marco Rubio, who acted as Secretary of State, to say his presence here is not consistent with the foreign policy goals of the United States. The High Court said, you're fine.

Speaker 4 You're good there. That was their first poster boy.
By the way, we told you that was not going to work, and we were right.

Speaker 4 And now this guy is going down because the Supreme Court would not order a mandate that we actually make sure he get back here.

Speaker 4 And now we're in this really interesting place where we're this legal limbo. But here's, and that's, that works for Trump because possession is nine tenths of the law and he's in El Salvador.

Speaker 4 Here is Stephen Miller. I'm going to advancing this now outside of the White House.
And I think it was yesterday, but I'm not sure.

Speaker 4 Where all these reporters, because they're all left-wingers, they all think this guy should be released back. It was today, okay, it was this morning.

Speaker 4 They all think he should be released back into the United States, gang member or not, terrorist or not, illegal or not.

Speaker 4 And Stephen Miller, who knows this subject like the back of his hand, did a little slice and dice in the media, watch this.

Speaker 8 Let's see if any of you have researched anything about this issue at all. Can anyone here tell me what would happen to the illegal alien from El Salvador if he came back to the United States?

Speaker 8 Does anyone here know? Does anyone want to guess?

Speaker 4 Any of you? He could be with his family.

Speaker 8 He would be arrested. He'd be put in confinement.

Speaker 8 He would be deported a second time to El Salvador again because there's no withholding order for an alien who's a member of foreign terrorist organization, number one.

Speaker 8 Number two, is the gang that he's a member of doesn't exist in El Salvador anymore. So what you're asking for is to be deported twice.

Speaker 8 So I'm trying to understand from you all is, so if he came back and under our laws, he was then deported to Egypt or to Somalia, would you then be saying, great, I'm so glad that you deported him to another country?

Speaker 8 Is that what you'd all be saying?

Speaker 4 But do you understand our immigration laws at all?

Speaker 8 Do you know the difference between a deportation order and a withholding order? Do you know the difference?

Speaker 4 Any of you, please.

Speaker 8 Do you?

Speaker 8 Well, we're not in the government.

Speaker 8 What I'm getting from this

Speaker 4 education committee is that not one person in the media knows the difference between a deportation order and a withholding order. That is their statement?

Speaker 8 You learning this all for the first time right now? I guess so. Okay.
So

Speaker 8 the deportation order means the judge has said he must be deported from the country. He has no right to remain here any longer.
He must be removed from the country.

Speaker 8 So his only options are to be deported to his home country or another country. That's it.
By the way,

Speaker 8 he doesn't get to stay here. He doesn't get to live here.
He has no future here. He has no right to be here.
He's an illegal alien.

Speaker 4 That was amazing. Was it not amazing?

Speaker 4 We're not going to get over it.

Speaker 2 No, it's incredible.

Speaker 2 And it's a source of frustration for me because

Speaker 2 I think all of us in media, we often get asked to respond immediately to things that happen

Speaker 2 outside our areas of expertise.

Speaker 2 You know, there's a reason why most people who are in journalism

Speaker 2 tend to cover a couple of topics for years on end because it takes that long to become intimately familiar with certain kinds of issues.

Speaker 2 So if you ask me a question about digital censorship right now or, you know, First Amendment online questions, I probably know the answer to that.

Speaker 2 But if it's about immigration law, you know, there's a huge mountain that you have to climb to know even the basics. And there's lots of stuff that

Speaker 2 is not terribly well known, like changes in the Patriot Act to the Immigration and Naturalization Act.

Speaker 2 These are all little tiny things that you have to know about the difference between what's legal and what's not.

Speaker 2 And And it takes not days or weeks, but sometimes it takes months or years to have a clue.

Speaker 2 So for these reporters just to act like they know what they're talking about, it's a huge window into the general cluelessness of the business about these things.

Speaker 4 I have to say to me, it's unforgivable, Walter, because...

Speaker 4 People who listen to this show were not surprised by one word we just went through from the time I started my little soliloquy to right now.

Speaker 4 They have heard me discuss this since this guy's name came up, both on this show and on our morning update news. Because it actually, like, if you're gonna cover it, you can, there are lots of things.

Speaker 4 Like, we didn't go nose dive into the tariff policy because we don't do a lot of economic news here. And I'm not an expert on that.

Speaker 4 I gave an interview to the Daily Mail promoting something, and they kept asking me, Are we gonna go to a recession? I'm like, What the fuck are you asking me for? I have no idea.

Speaker 4 How would I know we're having a recession? And my point is, like, I know my lane, and legal matters is 100% within my lane, and this is understandable.

Speaker 4 But did I know that this guy had an order of deportation and then that he got the suspension of removal just because of the El Salvadoran sob story he gave? Yes, I did. You know why? I read.

Speaker 4 I did my homework before I reported on it. And you could times that by a thousand if I were going to go show up curbside and try to cross-examine Stephen Miller.
Oh my God, they're lazy, Walter.

Speaker 4 They're lazy, which I guess is not a sin in and of itself, though it kind of is. It's sloth.
It's actually literally a sin.

Speaker 4 But in any event, on top of just being slothful on their couches, they then show up unprepared and then they write articles about it, about how this guy's married to an American and they screwed up.

Speaker 4 He never should have been deported without telling you he actually did have a deportation order. He never mentioned his sob story until they are about to kick him out.

Speaker 4 The gang that he got the deportation order suspended over no longer exists, and that he is Salvadoran.

Speaker 4 Like, what other country should we be sending him to since we have a valid deportation order for the guy right now? Anyway, that's why it's so abhorrent to see them so stupid and uninformed.

Speaker 4 Well,

Speaker 2 you know, they are uninformed. You are informed.
The legalistic details of this are fascinating. And I think you're correct in your analysis.

Speaker 2 But most Americans look at this and they go, oh, this is a guy we want out of here who isn't supposed to be here. And this is why we need Greenland.

Speaker 2 This is why we need our version of Siberia in the United States. We have to depend on other countries to exile people.

Speaker 2 We need something that we own, that nobody wants to go to, where it's really cold and really lonely, that we can send people without all this legal fauld raw when we want to get rid of them.

Speaker 2 And I think northern Greenland, interior Greenland, is a great candidate for that.

Speaker 2 Maybe, you know, in the old days, maybe it would have been sent to dig the Panama Canal. Maybe we need to make it a little deeper.
I don't know.

Speaker 2 But England had Australia, and we need something like that at this point, some third option to either ridiculous legal quagmires or, you know, total deportation.

Speaker 4 I mean, I think that's what we found here in El Salvador. What my audience keeps emailing me, and I do read the emails, you can email me, megan at megankelly.com,

Speaker 4 is where's our due process? Where's Lake and Riley's due process? Where's Jocelyn Nungaro's due process?

Speaker 4 Where's the due process of the American citizens who are getting murdered by these criminals in our country? Every week you read about these, the children who are getting molested, sexually molested.

Speaker 4 Like we're, we, I will say, the vast majority of people who listen to and watch this show couldn't give a shit about Abrego Garcia's due process. They don't care.
So to your original point, Walter,

Speaker 4 it's a win-win for Trump.

Speaker 2 The guy's argument for not wanting to go home was fear of crime. Well, that's our argument against

Speaker 2 getting rid of him. And I say it being our country and him being a visitor, we win and we should win quickly.

Speaker 2 Really, it is a horrible waste for all the fascination it provides. It's a horrible waste of lawyers, money, and

Speaker 2 time to be worrying about cases like this when there are tens of thousands of them that are probably nearly this serious and then hundreds of thousands behind those.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Well, we'll see.
I mean, there's a bit of a, I don't know, fisticuffs now because they're both like, I don't have the power.

Speaker 4 I don't have the power, which is a very interesting position because what the Supreme Court did was they said, facilitate, but they don't actually have to execute on it, and kicked it down to the lower court and said, you come up with a...

Speaker 4 with an order that's consistent with this order. And now I don't know what she's going to do because like this is, she's not going to be able to force the El Salvadoran president to do anything.

Speaker 4 And our government's going to continue to say we don't have control over what the El Salvadoran government does. Anyway, we'll watch it.
Guys, stand by. Quick break.

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Speaker 4 So Bill Maher finally got back on his show and told us what happened when he went to the White House and met with Donald Trump.

Speaker 4 I really, I like Bill Maher and I like going on his show, but he definitely has been suffering from a case of the TDS. Once the TDS gets you, it's hard to come out from under it.

Speaker 4 But I see shoots of grass mixing all sorts of metaphors. I think he's starting to come out from under it.
And to his credit, he went there. It was brokered by Kid Rock.

Speaker 4 And to his credit, President Trump allowed it, welcomed this, and was very gracious to Bill Maher, who has been brutal. about Trump for many years.

Speaker 4 So here's a bit of how Maher described the experience in SAT 12.

Speaker 19 Everything I've ever not liked about him was, I swear to God, absent, at least on this night with this guy.

Speaker 19 Bob, Kid Rock, told me the night before, he said, if you want to get a word in edgewise, you're going to have to cut him off. He'll just go on.

Speaker 4 Not at all.

Speaker 19 I've had so many conversations with prominent people who are much less connected. People who don't look you in the eye.

Speaker 19 People who don't really listen because they just want to get to their next thing. People whose response to things you say just doesn't track like, what?

Speaker 4 None of that with him.

Speaker 19 And he mostly steered the conversation to, what do you think about this?

Speaker 4 I know.

Speaker 19 Your mind is blown. So is mine.
I never felt I had to walk on eggshells around him.

Speaker 19 And honestly, I voted for Clinton and Obama, but I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was able to talk with Donald Trump.

Speaker 4 Pretty extraordinary, Walter.

Speaker 4 I'm starting to see the veil come down. You know, he's starting to see the man that a lot of us have seen for a long time now.
If we don't have the TDS, you got to, it's hard.

Speaker 4 If he comes out from the TDS, he might be one of the only ones to have ever actively had it and then shed the disease.

Speaker 2 I really like Bill Maher and I've been on his show and I love talking to him after you do the show. He usually throws a party.

Speaker 2 From talking to him, I've gotten to know that he really believes what he says most of the time. And I am sure he believes everything he said about Donald Trump.
And he sounds genuinely surprised.

Speaker 2 And that was a huge risk for him to go and to come back and

Speaker 2 to be that sincere and genuine. He's taking non-stop hell for it.
I mean, people are using every obscenity to tell him to go away right now. And

Speaker 2 I kind of admire him for it. You don't see actual risks taken in the media.
They talk about audience capture. Everybody ends up a slave to their audience's prejudices.
Well,

Speaker 2 he took the risk of not being. And he sounds a little like a kid, you know, who just danced with a girl and said, they're really not scary and they're not mean.

Speaker 2 They smell kind of good and they're soft all over.

Speaker 2 And that authenticity is touching to me. And boy, the abuse won't stop.

Speaker 4 Yeah,

Speaker 4 he was pretty defensive

Speaker 4 about that. Let me play stop 14.

Speaker 19 My favorite part of the whole night was we were standing in the blowjob room.

Speaker 4 Bill Clinton's Monica Lewinsky room.

Speaker 4 We were.

Speaker 19 And he said, you know, I've heard from a lot of people who really, who really liked that we're having this dinner.

Speaker 4 Not all, but a lot.

Speaker 19 And I said, same.

Speaker 19 A lot of people told me they loved it, but not all. And we agreed.
The people who don't even want us to talk, we don't like you. Don't talk, as opposed to what?

Speaker 19 Writing the same editorial for the millionth time and making 25-hour speeches into the wind. Really, that's what liberals have? He takes the piss out of everybody else, and we can hold ours?

Speaker 19 Okay, that's my report. You can hate me for it, but I'm not a liar.

Speaker 19 Trump was gracious and measured, and why he isn't that in other settings, I don't know, and I can't answer, and it's not my place to answer. I'm just telling you what I saw, and I wasn't

Speaker 4 That's the only thing. You know, Matt, I was trying to

Speaker 4 figure out

Speaker 4 how why this doesn't irk me the way the

Speaker 4 Morning Joe trip to Mar-a-Lago irritated me. Because that one I just felt was performative.
I really felt like they wanted access to a person in power who they had been so unfair to for years.

Speaker 4 I mean, they just been,

Speaker 4 that show in general is just such a lie and so unfair. And I don't feel that way about Bill Maher or his show at all.
I think he's an honest broker.

Speaker 4 And he has, you know, Trump supporters on all the time.

Speaker 4 It's just he, he isn't one. He hasn't been one.
So I, I agree that it was a courageous thing for him to do, for both of them to do.

Speaker 4 And I honestly, I give Trump tons of credit because Maher's been a chief antagonist. Your thoughts?

Speaker 2 Well, in addition to being an honest broker and I think believing what he says and like Walter, I've been on his show and I've talked to Bill many times after the show and always enjoyed talking to him.

Speaker 2 He's also a natural comic.

Speaker 2 And I think one thing that he really struggled with in the last eight years was the sheer quantity of laughable stuff that came out of the quote unquote left that he was told he wasn't allowed to laugh about.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that I think that was a big factor for him,

Speaker 2 you know, sort of being told that there are things that are off limits and the not-so-veiled threat that if you even entertain the idea of calling Donald Trump sane or a normal politician in public, that your career is going to be over.

Speaker 2 Now, Bill is just big enough that he can avoid the fate that most everybody else who went there experienced. And I think, you know,

Speaker 2 this thing that he did, I think it's a significant moment for media because now there might be some other people who come out of the woodwork and say, you know what, I'm just tired of saying the same stuff over and over again and not really fully believing it.

Speaker 4 I wonder if it's going to change at all the way he covers the president, because

Speaker 4 he's definitely been tough on Trump.

Speaker 4 He's very tough on Democrats, too, by the way. He hates wokeism.
He's been a very strong ally in that battle. But usually on Trump, he's saying something negative.

Speaker 4 And so I do wonder now if he'll start saying more positive things, Walter. And if so, what happens with his audience?

Speaker 2 Bill's got a unique relationship to his audience.

Speaker 2 He's he's always challenging them really i mean every bill maher show has something that's a little uncomfortable for people uh that doesn't play to their prejudices or their you know assumptions so this is the biggest case of that yet and uh i think his audience is going to stick with him and i and i but i i think he'll stay just as tough on trump but it will be more issues-based

Speaker 4 I think he's going to stay tough stuff on Trump or tough on Trump as well. He's just,

Speaker 4 you know, he doesn't like Trump.

Speaker 4 I think that's still true, but I think he saw like a glimpse of the man like that we actually know, like the real Trump and not the fighter who's out there being attacked all the time, who's got to be, you know, tough and is tough in return.

Speaker 4 And, you know, Bill Maher, among many others, has thrown some very tough punches his way as well. So anyway, I am in favor of the meeting.

Speaker 4 I feel very differently about it than I did about the Mar-a-Lago kiss the ring-a-thon by members of the media who make their living tearing him down with lies. That's not what Maher does.

Speaker 4 Anyway, guys, this was such a pleasure. Thanks for being here today on this special Monday edition.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. Thanks, Megan.
Thank you, Megan. Nice.

Speaker 4 See you soon.

Speaker 4 I forgot to, I was so focused on my daughter Yarli's birthday today, I forgot to say happy one-day belated birthday. Strudwick.
Yes, Strudwick turned four, and it's happening. No, it's not.

Speaker 4 He's still very naughty. We'll see you tomorrow.

Speaker 4 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and and no fear.

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